Category Archive

Watching the heavy coverage of the awful events in Virginia Tech University, I couldn’t help but reflect on my time on campus, and question if the Rutgers commmunity (student body, professors, deans, campus police, etc.) would have handled this any differently than our peers in VT.

As many of you are surely aware, campus life can be a bit mundane. It’s a life of routine and quite frankly just a lazy (nonetheless fun) experience. Some of us would literally crawl to morning classes dressed down because we just didn’t care. This sort of carelessness seems for lack of a better term “ideal” or “necessary” (yikes) to the collegiate environment. Yes, surely there are exams/homework/projects that need to be completed before their respective deadlines, but the detachment from the outside world allows these responsibilities to be met around our own time.

The only reason I even felt like commenting on the above is there is just no way you can have extra police force walking around campus without any precedent, and I don’t think (and hope) that such a scenario would ever be the case. Dorm life and campus life in general is supposed to be liberal. Such an imposing presence would be far too much of an interruption on the lives of the students and eventually many might even protest it. It just doesn’t work. From that viewpoint a major tragedy like a person on a shooting rampage could not be avoided on any campus in this country.

Then there’s the question of the 2 hour gap between shootings. The first person was shot in one dorm around at approximately 7:15 am. The murders in the engineering building occurred 2 hours later, just some time after the university sent out the mass e-mail notifying students of the first shootings. No classes were cancelled immediately after the first shootings.

I know the last thing the school wants to do is cancel classes, especially so close to the end of the semester when these classes would be difficult to make up. But I just dont see how you can have a thorough search without cutting the volume of people around campus. ughh. It’s difficult to come up with a solution to this problem in a such a short time span but something had to be done to contact the kids inside all dorms. isnt that where contacting resident advisors could have provided a little more organization (not guaranteeing anything, of course)?

Rutgers would cancel classes for the remainder of the day when it snows, citing the possibly dangerous commute from campus to campus. Keeping in mind the majority of students use the bus system it is a smart move, but at times it seemed like the decision would likely be delayed for the sake of completing the majority of the school day. But how would it act the same if a gunman was comfirmed to be around campus?

It’s easy to take campus life for granted because it’s so easy for the most part. The only problems I ever tried to anticipate is buying books, grabbing something to eat between classes, parking, or silly bullshit like that. I never once felt to be in danger around campus, and no one should.

I dont even really know why I’m writing this. I just became so sad at one of the accounts of Monday’s events: some of the medical workers, while carrying the bodies to the ambulance truck, heard the ringing of the casualties’ cell phones. Likely friends and families checking to see if they were alright.

I send my condolences to all friends and families of the victims of Virginia Tech.